This site is dedicated to providing moderate-right opinions, and information and articles that counter some of the nonsense being inculcated in our young people by public schools and by many colleges and universities. It rejects multiculturalism, embraces the melting pot and celebrates the idea of America. *Vi er all Dansk nu.*

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Sensible Thoughts on Our Energy Needs

My readers know I favor nuclear energy and think Biofuels are no answer. I favor nuclear because it has proven to be the safest, lowest cost and cleanest source of electrical power, and because newer designs could yield free hydrogen for powering vehicles. One objection to nuclear is the fear of a massive failure due to an earthquake. The recent experience in Japan, discussed below, should calm these fears.

As for Biofuels, not only are they more and more unpromising the more we learn about their limitations, the providing of subsidies to encourage their use and production is already causing massive distortions in food supplies and prices; and focusing on them diverts us from real solutions – more domestic drilling for the short run – and nuclear-hydrogen for the long run.

Actually the second article below is kinder to Biofuels than most, because many scientists have concluded that the use of a gallon of Biofuels consumes more than a gallon of petroleum.

“If an earthquake of about 6 or larger occurs anywhere around the globe, every single sand grain dances on this planet.

-- Ross Stein, U.S. Geological Survey

Amid the photos of collapsed houses, shattered roads and buckled bridges, the most arresting image out of Japan after last month's 6.8-magnitude earthquake was of black smoke billowing from an electrical transformer at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, near the epicenter. The plant has seven reactors and 8.2 million kilowatts of generating capacity, making it the world's largest nuclear facility.

Initially, officials said damage was confined to a small fire and a 300 gallon leak of water with negligible amounts of radioactivity. But that was followed by reports of toppled barrels of low-level nuclear waste. Then came word that Tokyo Electric may have unwittingly situated the plant atop an active seismic fault.

After a recent three-day examination of the plant, however, six international safety experts dispatched by the International Atomic Energy Agency reported better news. The July 16 earthquake exceeded the level of seismic activity the facility was designed to withstand, but the design still helped contain the damage. No one was hurt, and there was no measurable environmental fallout from the plant.

"Safety related structures, systems and components of the plant seem to be in a general condition, much better than might be expected for such a strong earthquake, and there is no visible significant damage," the IAEA report said.

That's comforting for Japan, and good news for those who want to revive the nuclear energy industry in the U.S.

The U.S. has 104 operating reactors at 65 sites, providing roughly 20 percent of the country's energy needs, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Illinois, with 11 reactors at six sites, has the highest nuclear capacity of any state.

With energy consumption and concerns about global warming rising, more nuclear power is a must. It can be done efficiently, cost-effectively ... and safely.

Before a plant is built in the U.S., extensive studies are done at the site to account for potential natural hazards. Plants in different areas are built to different codes, to account for the likelihood of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding and other natural disasters.

"They're overdesigned," said David Wald of the U.S. Geological Survey. "They're very tough structures."

They had at one time also become prohibitively expensive structures. Unit 1 of the Watts Bar nuclear plant in Tennessee, the last nuclear reactor to go into service in the U.S., took 23 years to build and open and cost $6.2 billion. Though the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island stopped nuclear expansion, skyrocketing costs and endless construction delays had already started to cripple the industry.

The cost of nuclear power, however, is poised to come down, and its efficiency has been rising….

Inception to operation would take just seven years, meaning that new nuclear power plants could come online as early as 2015.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said last May that nuclear power, along with renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power, has to be in the mix of technologies to curb global warming.

Nuclear power is a safer industry, it is a more efficient industry, and it is critical to answering energy demands and protecting the environment. The U.S. can have faith in nuclear power.” Chicago Tribune

WE MUST MOVE our nation beyond fossil fuels. But let’s not be suckered by the promoters of such bio-fuel alternatives as corn ethanol and soy bodies.

Large companies that stand to reap billions in federal subsidies and tax breaks from these energy “sources” are selling them as the way to a healthy planet and energy independence for the United States. For two reasons, don’t believe it.

First, consider “energy return on energy invested,” or EROEI. This is how much energy we “earn” for every unit of energy we “spend” to get it.

Gasoline’s EROEI ranges between 6-to-1 and 10-to-1, says Cutler Cleveland, director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Boston University. In other words, we get anywhere from 6 to 10 gallons of gasoline for every gallon we use to find oil, pump it out of the ground and refine it. But the EROEI of corn-based ethanol, the most common U.S. bio-fuel, is a mere 1.34-to-1, the Agriculture Department says. So even though an acre of corn can make 360 gallons of ethanol, only 90 gallons of that is “new” fuel.

Expand this to a larger geographic scale. Researchers at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics calculate that planting the entire state of Iowa in corn and using it for ethanol would give us enough new fuel for about five days’ worth of U.S. gasoline use. For policy-makers, this should be a red flag signaling that even enormous increases in ethanol production would do basically nothing to move America to energy independence.

Second, consider the environmental effects of bio-fuels.The corn used to make the ethanol at your local gas pump exacts a heavy price from our land and water. The fertilizer required for high corn yields starts as a resource, but once it leaves farm fields — and most does — it essentially becomes poison, polluting our lakes and rivers, harming drinking water and creating a huge lifeless zone at its final destination, the Gulf of Mexico. Corn production also uses actual poisons in the form of pesticides, and these too can end up in our water and even our food.

And corn plants have wimpy roots that do a poor job of preventing erosion. Millions of tons of superb, irreplaceable Midwestern soils are lost from fields every year because of corn.

And other bio-fuels? Soybean-based bodies have an EROEI of about 1.9 to 1, according to University of Minnesota ecology Prof. David Tilman and his colleagues. That’s better than corn ethanol, but still a poor return, and soybeans carry much of corn’s environmental baggage.

An unproven form of bio-fuel production would wring several forms of energy, including ethanol, from grass, tree pulp and other plant material we can’t eat. No one yet makes fuel this way with an acceptable EROEI. Efficiency might improve over time, but the environmental goodness of the resulting fuel will depend on the kinds of plants used.

Tilman favors growing diverse mixtures of long-lived, deep-rooted native plants on damaged, unproductive farmland. These prairie-like mixtures would mean much less erosion than corn and soybeans. They could also pull more of the nutrients they need from air and soil than do common crops.

Unclear, though, is whether they could meet a significant fraction of our energy needs. The Agriculture Department’s Michael Russelle and other researchers suggest that Tilman overestimates the EROEI of these mixtures and the amount of damaged land available. They also say it’s difficult to establish and maintain these mixtures. Tilman disputes these arguments, but it’s very much an unsettled question.

So where do we turn? Wind and solar energy will get us part of the way. These technologies have EROEIs of up to 20-to-1 and fewer unpleasant environmental side-effects than bio-fuels. But a big answer is conservation: We need to use much less energy in the first place by living in smaller homes, buying smaller cars, driving less, trimming our general consumption, and being obsessive about energy efficiency.

We must move beyond fossil fuels. But bio-fuels are not the answer. Let’s pursue real solutions that are easy on our planet.

4 Comments:

Good column, Russell. Biofuels could still be part of the solution, though. Purdue University is patenting a process called H2-CAR, in which hydrogen is added to the process for making biofuel, which triples the yield for a given amount of biomass. It still won't replace all the motor fuel the world uses, but with some straight hydrogen and some battery power, combined with higher fuel efficiency standards, we could maybe just squeak by.

I know from your earlier blogs that you don't believe global warming is real. I wish I could accept that view, but the evidence is too strong. People try to dodge this issue by pointing to other possible causes, but none of them fit the data. Artificial CO2 fits it perfectly. If you have a moment, look at Global Warming: A Guide for the Perplexed and if you see a flaw in the logic please point it out.

It does not appear that this site has adjusted its data to reflect the errors discovered this summer.

"In August, it was revealed that NASA scientists had corrected an error that resulted in 1934 replacing 1998 as the warmest year on record in the U.S. Repeatedly the data put forth to justify the global warming hoax has been debunked.

As Dr. David Wojick recently noted, “The real significance is that such a small correction can make such a big difference. The reason is that the much touted warming of the last three decades is merely a return to earlier warm times, after an equally long period of cooling…There is no way this pattern constitutes a warming trend…In short, there is no evidence for human-induced global warming in the U.S. temperature record.”

“Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Dr. Ian Wilson after reviewing a new study that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research authored by a Brookhaven National Lab scientist Stephen Schwartz. A former Harvard physicist, Dr. Lubos Motl, said the new study has reduced global warming fear-mongers to “playing the children’s game to scare each other.”

The new research concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as a series of reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has asserted for years. The IPCC reports have been increasingly dismissed as deliberate distortions of data that amount to little more than propaganda to advance the “global warming” hoax.

Having testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, paleoclimate scientist, Bob Carter, noted in a June 18, 2007 essay that global warming has stopped. There has been little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 17 percent. Thus, the connection between CO2 and “global warming”, the key to the claims that it is occurring and will increase has been proven wrong.

Dr. Roy Spencer, another critic of the global warming hoax, has noted that “At least 80 percent of the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor and clouds, and those are largely under the control of precipitation systems.” The computer models used by advocates of global warming have been unable to include the actions and impact of clouds, thus rendering them seriously flawed.

Prior to and during 2007, one research study after another revealed that the central premise of “global warming” lacks any scientific merit. One by Dr. Tim Patterson concluded that, “The earth temperature does respond to the solar cycle as confirmed by numerous studies.” The solar cycle is known to be about eleven years in length and reflects increased or decreased sunspot (magnetic storms) activity. It is the Sun that largely determines the Earth’s temperature, which is never the same throughout the planet, given seasonal and solar changes.

In 2007, meteorologist Anthony Watts who led a team of researchers revealed that, “The U.S. National Climate Data Center is in the middle of a scandal. Their global observing network, the heart and soul of surface weather measurement, is a disaster.” It had been discovered that many of the measuring stations were placed in locations such as on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels, beside heat exhaust vents, and even attached to hot chimneys and above outdoor grills!

Determining the Earth’s temperature, says Bjarne Andresen, a professor at The Niels Borh Institute, University of Copenhagen, collaborated with two other professors to write an article in Science Daily, saying, “It is impossible to talk about a single temperature for something as complicated as the climate of the Earth.” Indeed, “differences in temperature drive the processes and create the storms, sea currents, thunder, etc. which make up the climate.”

In May 2007, Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin dismissed fears of increased man-made CO2 in the atmosphere. He called the “global warming” argument “absurd.” As to any increase in the Earth’s temperature, he said, “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting carbon dioxide in the air.”

On August 15, 2007, meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, said, “If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our annual anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor.”"

The adjustments you mention have been widely publicized. I didn't change the arguments in the web site because the corrections were trivial--more in the line of refinements than changes. That was made clear in the professional literature.

Overstatements coming from the usual crowd of deniers isn't a rebuttal. They can't possibly be right because they contradict each other.

According to your citations, Wojick says there's no warming happening. Wilson says it's happening but he has his own favorite theory, which hasn't been accepted by his peers, for why. Motl says the world is cooling. Carter says temperature leveled off since 1979. Spencer says water vapor accounts for 80% of the greenhouse effect, but doesn't reflect on the fact that if CO2 accounts for only 10% that's more than enough to cause the effects we've seen. Patterson argues that there can only be one possible cause of climate change, but doesn't explain why. Watts still believes the old canard, long discarded, about the temperature measurements being unreliable. Andresen says there's no such thing as average temperature. Bryson says it's going up but it's all natural. And D'Aleo says CO2 isn't important.

This really is very unscholarly. To base a conclusion on quotes that you believe just because you like the sound of them is a poor foundation for knowledge. The contradictions between them are enough to reject the thesis. And to prefer them over published and peer-reviewed data is positively unscientific.

Rob,You have a losing arguement no matter how persuasive your data. A conclusion has already been reached and now the articles and quotes are selected only that agree with that desired conclusion. I don't understand this either....

I will say however that the overstatements you refer to seem to be coming from BOTH sides. This does not help in the reasoned review of the facts. It's clear that a lot of this is a matter of degrees no pun intended. I DO hope the deniers are right, I'd love to be wrong....

About Me

Russell Wilcox is a retired college professor who spends several months in Florida and several months in Rhode Island each year, and whose interests include boating and sailing, sports, political activism, ballroom dancing and bridge. He has an MBA from Harvard, a Computer Systems CAGS from Bryant and a BS from Northeastern. He has worked in industry for EG&G and Texas Instruments, operated his own business with more than 200 employees, and served as Director of the Computer Information Systems Program for Stonehill College. An Army veteran and private pilot, he is a published author, and is the proud father of four children and the proud grandfather of seven grandchildren and one greatgrandchild. A holder of two patents in microchip connections and a true product of the melting pot, his father is the son of a Yankee farmer, and his mother the first generation daughter of Italian immigrants who retained their culture, but strove mightily to become Americans, sending four sons to fight against Hitler and Mussolini.